| This dissertation in anthropology illuminates the U.S. federal political decision-making process on energy transportation infrastructure by focusing on the work of specific intellectuals, that is, economists, lawyers, and other specialists working within the increasingly market-oriented world of natural gas energy production. Through writing reports, legislation, and future scenarios, these specific intellectuals amass a 30-year paper trail of analytical material required to move forward on building Alaska's natural gas pipeline project.; I argue that beginning in late 2001 after Arctic energy producers, the State of Alaska, and the U.S. Congress acknowledge that building the Alaska gas pipeline cannot depend upon market forces to move forward, the project recoils back onto its epistemic origins, that is, the vocabulary, horizon of expectation, and semantic components of early federal legislation created in the 1970s, which existed during an initial period of interest in the pipeline. The Alaska Natural Gas Transportation Act of 1976 (ANGTA) defined early visions of how Alaska's pipeline would be built. The statute was drafted under unique conditions embedding the project within a particular nomenclature of strategic political decision making, economic logic, and less sophisticated technology.; In the context of current market conditions, stakeholders realize the pipeline project has no where to go beyond creating new levels of recursive meaning through legislation drafting. During this period, the ANGTA increasingly becomes a rationality of value creation in the absence of market values which could otherwise push the project out of meaning and into the future (that is, meaning recycled from ANGTA's past and today in various stages of decay). This rationality finds its unity in the limitations imposed by the opacity of its self-referentiality. As the ANGTA builds on itself, it becomes bigger and heavier, requiring more complicated references, cross-references, etc. Transparency is sought, but only for the strong willed, who can mine all the genealogical referents, while other stakeholders are left to do the best they can at identifying the steps necessary to make claims on the project.; I gathered data firsthand while serving as associate director of energy (2002--2003), as energy coordinator (2001--2002) in the office of the Alaska governor. |
